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Question for people who are successfully avoiding having to use PulseAudio: is there any particular distro that you are using that you trust not to go down this road? I haven't used Linux as my daily driver for years but I've been looking at switching back recently. It seems a lot harder to avoid PA than it used to be.
I gave up on Firefox at the end of last year, and I don't miss it at all. If I hadn't already done it, though, this would've sent me over the edge. (I do not and will never run Pulse on any of my systems.) Currently using a stripped-down version of Chrome, and web browsing has never been better. Edit: the downvoting on this site is goddamned baffling sometimes. What about my comment has you guys offended today?
The linked thread implies that Chrome doesn't support ALSA either. Is that not true?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the stripped-down version of Chrome you use? Is it something prepackaged or something you've crafted by stripping yourself?
Maybe Chromium? https://www.chromium.org/Home It's prepackaged but I kind of lost track how it's different. It used to be that it didn't support flash but that might have changed.
There is real cost to supporting features, and very often, the decision basically amounts to having to choose which feature scarce resources is used for. So you have to be prepared to defend having to divert resources for pet features--keeping in mind that sometimes the other feature is "making sure it builds tomorrow."
From what I can tell, the ALSA backend has been poorly maintained for some time. When the present state of affairs is deficient, and probably retarding code quality in other areas. If it's in a poor state for a long time, it's hard to argue that it is necessary to maintain support--or even that desupporting it will make a huge impact.
If you want to convince me to support something, offering help would be a great start. It could be as little as offering to test and QA a feature, or as much as providing an implementation patch and offering to maintain it for the foreseeable future. Insulting my intelligence and issuing threats for noncompliance are just going to result in me ignoring you, perhaps after laughing at you for a bit.
And remember, if you're not familiar with the relevant code, you're not really qualified to say how hard it is to actually do something. Code architectures may not be implemented the way you expect them to be, so what seems like it should be an obvious minor feature may turn out to require thousands of lines of changes (that was exactly how my first open source contribution turned out--what I thought should have been a five-line patch or so was really 1000 or so lines of changes).
Firefox is cross platform. It has to support Win32/64 sound, Linux (alsa/pulse), whatever the hell FreeBSD and MacOS use .. Back in 2013 I had a lot of issues with Steam games not running correctly with PulseAudio (lots of static instead of sound half the time I tried to start a game). Sometimes doing a killall on the pulseaudio server would help, sometimes it would not. On that machine, I added a -pulseaudio USE fla…
Question for people who are successfully avoiding having to use PulseAudio: is there any particular distro that you are using that you trust not to go down this road? I haven't used Linux as my daily driver for years but I've been looking at switching back recently. It seems a lot harder to avoid PA than it used to be.
As someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread, by being an ALSA user you're already in a tiny minority of the Linux world. You might as well be using an OS where your values in are the majority - it's nice to not have to fight against the defaults.
PulseAudio is a over-complicated piece of bloated shit, like every single project developed by Lennart Poettering. If this man had never entered software development, I would probably not had gone completely insane.
Okay, I understand that it breaks systems with badly written audio drivers, but can we really blame Pulseaudio for that?